David McWilliams’ racehorse profits targeted in $92m NDIS fraud probe by BDO liquidators

David McWilliams and wife Laura Fullarton, a property which was in Ms Fullarton’s name and a sports memorabilia man cave at ALAMMC’s headquarters.

David McWilliams might have dudded investors in his disabled housing schemes out of close to $92m, but at least one of his alternative plans for their money – a racehorse – delivered him a return.

Rather than spending the money collected from investors for ALAMMC Developments on actually building the houses for the severely disabled, McWilliams – according to court filings by the liquidators of the group, BDO – splurged cash on living the high life.

Companies in the group bought supercars – a McLaren 720S coupe, an Aston Martin F1, and a Porsche 718 – and decked out an “office” with its own basketball court and video game consoles.

David McWilliams.

McWilliams punted about $40m of investor cash over the tables at Queensland casinos, losing about $4m of it.

ALAMMC also loaned McWilliams and wife Laura Fullarton a combined $5.3m, and bought a pub in the South Australian industrial town of Whyalla, through a company run by the supposed property developer and his son, Bailey.

And what are flash cars and high living without a racehorse or two?

The first, Ellibaby, hasn’t done much over the course of its career, winning a couple of country races and total prize money of around $60,000.

But the second is a bit of a stunner, collecting prize money worth more than $1.6m over the last year, including a win in a group 2 race at Randwick in March.

In fact, according to the horse’s profile on Racenet, the filly has delivered a return to investors of around 45 per cent. Which, coincidentally, is the return promised to the poor sods who invested in McWilliams’ NDIS property schemes.

Within The Law ridden by Ben Melham races up the Flemington straight in 2024. Picture: Michael Klein

McWilliam’s share of that prize pool is now in the sights of BDO liquidators Andrew Fielding and Helen Newman, who won Federal Court permission this week to sue Bailey McWilliams for the cash. They were also appointed as liquidators to other group companies, rather than receivers – meaning they can start handing out compulsory interview notices to the main players to further their investigations.

Sadly for investors, the horse cash probably won’t be much more than a couple of hundred thousand – McWilliams shares ownership with a small syndicate, and racing prize money is also shared with trainers and jockeys.

Oh, and the name of the horse? Within the Law.

Investors that lost their savings to fund McWilliams’ lifestyle will find out how apt that name is when ASIC finally completes its criminal investigation into the collapse of the ALAMMC investment group, we guess.

Meanwhile, Fielding and Newman are getting on with the job of flogging off the rest of the group’s remaining assets, and those associated with McWilliams’ family.

The Whyalla pub, we hear, is about to go on the market, and BDO is also seeking a buyer for land bought in Fiji to build a resort hotel – ALAMMC spent $6.8m on the development, court documents show.

Mayne game

A big win for Mayne Pharma over US drugmaker Cosette this week, after the NSW Supreme Court ordered the private equity-backed company to make good on its $670m takeover offer. But could there still be a twist?

Margin Call was fascinated to note Mayne’s announcement to the market on Thursday, which said the Foreign Investment Review Board still wasn’t ready to make a decision on Cosette’s takeover offer, 10 months after it was first flagged to the market.

No real surprise there. It was always slow, but the time it takes FIRB to make a recommendation these days is causing self-inflicted baldness across the ranks of Australia’s legal and advisory community.

But could the reason be a bit of dirty pool instead?

South Australia’s Premier, Peter Malinauskas. Picture: Nikki Short

One of the objections to the takeover has come from South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas, over a threat – made by either Mayne or Cosette, depending on which version of events you read – to close the company’s manufacturing facility in Adelaide.

Mayne says that it never made such a threat, and that shutting down the plant would be stupid, even given US President Donald Trump’s threat to whack a tariff on Australian pharmaceutical exports, because it doesn’t send much of the factory’s product to the US.

And, curiously enough, the threats were apparently made in July – only shortly after Cosette tried to back away from its takeover offer for the Australian company.

And Malinauskas’ willingness to defend South Australian industry isn’t hard to predict, given he’s been more than happy to spend taxpayer cash to prevent the closure of the Whyalla steelworks, after all.

Could it be that, worried that the court would rule against it, Cosette’s fallback option was to undermine its own case to the FIRB?

After all, flinging around a bit of nationalism in the direction of the review board, supposedly in the service of commercial interest, is becoming a well-worn tactic these days.

Witness the mudslinging over Beach Energy’s purported lobbying against a bid for Santos by ADNOC.

Given the secrecy with which the FIRB shrouds its decision-making – and the time it takes to actually do it – we’ll probably never know the answer.

But the FIRB wouldn’t do its reputation any good if it really did allow Cosette to get around the courts by sabotaging its own case to the review board.